"Everybody loved him," she said before the service at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in southeast Washington. "Once you get in contact with Joe you couldn't say anything bad about him because he was so beautiful. He never talked about people, he always built people up. We will miss him very deeply."

Another co-worker, Joann Ratliff-Allen, said she noticed last week that Curseen seemed to be ill, but didn't think anything about it.

She and Tucker, along with the other workers at the Brentwood facility where the anthrax-laced letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was processed, are taking antibiotics.

Jack Johnson, the state's attorney for Prince George's County, said he met Curseen in 1993 when the postal worker volunteered to be on his campaign staff.

"It just angers me to know that there is an evil person out there who would send poison and kill a good, decent person like Joe Curseen and all of the other innocent victims in this community," he said.

Curseen, 47, is one of two D.C.-area postal workers to die from inhalation anthrax.

A funeral was held Friday for Thomas Morris Jr., 55, of Suitland, Maryland.

A public memorial for the postal workers is expected to be held next week, U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman Deborah Willhite said.

A second postal facility, Southwest Post Office on L Street, was shut Friday after traces of anthrax were discovered there.

Willhite said all of the workers had already been taking antibiotics as a precaution so she does not "expect that there will be any fallout from this."